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Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: bbc, bridgerton, disney, doctor who, Millie Gibson, Ncuti Gatwa, russell t davies
Doctor Who S01E06 "Rogue" Reminds Us That Love Is Universal: Review
"Rogue" is the type of story Doctor Who does quite well, commenting on tropes while also updating them to offer new and unique perspectives.
"Rogue" is, in many ways, the most "Doctor Who" episode this season and also different. It's a time travel story where The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby (Millie Gibson) travel back in time just to visit a historical period again just for fun and stumble upon a threat to the world. Typical Doctor Who plot, right? Yet it also does something new in all the ways you expect a typical episode of not just Doctor Who but genre television, so the series feels new and fresh again for the streaming era.
The Doctor and Ruby visit Regency England just to be tourists and stumble upon an alien menace and the space bounty hunter on the case. If you feel a bit of déjà vu, you're right. We have been here before in a different way. It's like stepping into an alternate timeline. The alien villains in this episode are not unlike the ones in the 2007 two-parter "Human Nature" and "Family of Blood", a family of parasites who are simply parasitic, greedy, and sadistic but with a darkly funny twist: they're supergeeks. "Rogue" feels reminiscent of Steven Moffat's "The Girl in the Fireplace," the first episode in the 21st Century revival of Doctor Who that featured the Doctor in a love story. There, The Doctor is pursued by Madame de Pompidou in Pre-Revolutionary France. In the previous era of the series, The Doctor was written by Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat as the object of desire, pursued by women (and Captain Jack). What's different this time is The Doctor is unambiguously the romantic pursuer openly attracted to Rogue. Rogue is the reverse of Captain Jack here, brooding, taciturn, and mysterious rather than gregarious and openly flirtatious. It's the Doctor who flirts this time outrageously.
The Portrait of Susan Twist
The Susan Twist cameo is a callback to a detail in the classic era of the show. She appears in a portrait in the manor that Ruby spots. It's implied that whoever she was in this time period, she might have since passed away. In the 1988 story "Silver Nemesis," where the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and Ace (Sophie Aldred) stumble upon a portrait of Ace in period dress in an English manner, hinting at a story that hasn't happened yet and we never saw. The first person to make a cameo in a story via a portrait was Alfred Hitchcock in one of his movies, but Hitchcock the man has since been revealed as something of a #MeToo case study, so we don't talk about him that much these days though his movies are so defining for suspense that they're almost a genre in themselves.
Doctor Who Makes "Bridgerton" Better!
What's unspoken but drives the plot of "Rogue" is that The Doctor, Ruby, and the alien Chuldur are all fans of Bridgerton. They came to 18th Century England because of that. The episode co-writer Kate Herron has admitted as much in interviews. The entire episode is fanfic, and it's about fanfic and cosplaying. The Doctor and Ruby are cosplaying at Bridgerton, and so are the Chuldur. They're tourists, but the Chuldur are like rich, privileged tourists who destroy the places they visit, literally. How many times have you wished evil bird aliens would just eat some of the cast of Bridgerton? What, I'm the only one? If there's anyone in the cast who's really chewing the scenery in "Rogue," it's Indira Varma, who's clearly having a ball and plays it with the right amount of camp and relish. There are so many geek in-jokes that the class commentary is almost drowned out
And Bridgerton itself is fanfic. The books and the Netflix TV series are really pastiches of Georgette Heyer's Regency romance novels, which were written in the 20th Century and themselves pastiches of Jane Austen's novels and did it not only perfectly but were often very funny, funnier than Bridgerton.
Cosplaying and Geeky Callbacks Galore!
Literally everyone is cosplaying in "Rogue". The Doctor, Ruby, the Chuldur, and Rogue, who turns out to be also cosplaying a brooding Mr. Darcy type from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice who turns out to be a geek – he's even a D&D player who has Kylie Minogue songs on his playlist! "Can't Get You Out of My Head" is an appropriate song and Kylie Monologue guest-starred in the 2007 Christmas Special "Voyage of the Damned". As he woos Rogue, the Doctor sings "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka, a role Ncuti Gatwa expressed a desire to play.
The musical cues are also on point. There's a classical riff on Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy" when the Doctor spots Rogue (Jonathan Groff) for the first time. The Doctor and Rogue dance to a classical music cover of Grace Jones' classic 1980s pop tango "I've Seen That Face Before" before cosplaying as gay versions of a troubled Regency romantic couple. Ruby cosplays at dancing and fighting against the Chuldur trying to eat her to a classical violin cover version of Lady Gaga's "Poker Face." Even the music in this episode is cosplaying!
One Unexpected Cameo
Yes, we get a reminder that The Doctor has been more than a dozen past selves when Rogue scans them and sees their past faces. I wonder if those Doctor actors had to get a royalty cheque for their faces being shown in the episode. That's what unions are for, after all. Anyway, hardcore fans are freaking out at the cameo of Richard E. Grant's face. Apart from playing the comic book version of Loki, Grant had previously played one version of The Doctor in Steven Moffat's 1999 Comic Relief half-hour non-canonical spoof episode "The Curse of Fatal Death," and then another Doctor in the audio drama (with animation) "Scream of the Shalka" – and in a performance so lazy and dreadful that Russell T. Davies has made it clear he was never on the list to be the next Doctor. Fans will be arguing about how "Scream of the Shalka" could possibly fit into continuity, especially where it featured Derek Jacobi's The Master as the Doctor's companion who stays inside the Tardis years before he appears on the TV series in Davies' revival. We'll just leave it at that because speculating on Doctor Who continuity is its own endless rabbit hole.
A Metacommentary About Fandom
Briony Redman and Kate Herron, who previously wrote for and the latter directed on Loki, may have written "The Ultimate Fan TV Script" not just about Doctor Who but Bridgerton and every romantic trope-y show on streamers, particularly Netflix, that has come to define fandom in the past decade. "Rogue" is a satirical metacommentary on geek culture. Even Rogue geeks out at the Tardis. The Chudlhurs are malicious, greedy aliens who are quite literally toxic fans – it's not even subtext; it's right there on the surface! It's not enough for them to cosplay; they are literal parasites who eat and kill the thing they love to be them, then get bored to find something else to feed on. The villains in "Rogue" are evil cosplayers, and that's kind of hilarious, killing aside, but what's a genre story without characters dying for our pop culture enjoyment? What is geekdom, after all, if it can't eat its own in an episode of Doctor Who?
And how might being a geek pay off? If you get to be like Russell T. Davies, Briony Redman, and Kate Herron – it becomes literally your job! And if fans and geeks love your work? You get to do more work! That's a win-win-win!
How Does This Episode "Change the Doctor Forever"?
Some of you might have seen the hype that this episode "changes The Doctor forever." Does it really? Well, it comes out and says it: this is a Doctor who is a sexual being. All adults are. The Doctor makes it clear his attraction to Rogue is not just emotional but physical. Jonathan Groff underplays Rogue's emotions with a subtle, suppressed wry humour to complement Ncuti Gatwa's expansive energy perfectly. No other episode of Doctor Who has been this overt in carrying sexual vibes. But that's Bridgerton's whole job! That's the entire job of the romance genre, after all! (Granted, the Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) was clearly attracted to the plant being Jabe in "The End of the World," but that was subtext, and Steven Moffat made it clear the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) got it on with River Song (Alex Kingston) a lot, but never really showed it outright about from them kissing.)
The Most Romantic Episode of Doctor Who to Date
You don't have to be LGBTQ to find the romantic comedy exhilarating. You just have to appreciate good storytelling and human emotions. Who in their right mind is going to hate Love? The Doctor and Rogue are drawn together not just from physical attraction, but both recognize the wound at the other's core: the pain of loss. Their common loneliness is what makes them fall in love so quickly. "Rogue" is possibly the best romantic comedy and adventure of the year, more than anything else in movies or television in the way it surprises with its turns. This is because it plays on several levels: the Doctor and Rogue hilariously subvert and deconstruct the tropes of romance fiction while cosplaying the heartbreak part of romances to lay a trap for the baddies, pretending to break up while very much in love and fully intending to be together.
The main conflict of every love story is what's going to keep the lovers from getting together. In adventures like Buffy the Vampire and Doctor Who, it's always the world, the war they fight where one lover will sacrifice themselves for the other – and the whole world. Rogue's sacrifice is what makes him worthy of The Doctor's love. By the end, the Doctor puts on Rogue's ring, which is a final romantic gesture.
So, who's the new boss in charge of the bounty hunter business Rogue works for? Is it the same boss that Beep the Meep referred to back in "The Star Beast?"
Doctor Who is now streaming globally on Disney+.
Doctor Who Season 1 Episode 6: "Rogue"
10/10
A perfect rating for this episode because it does everything you expect from a show but plays all the common tropes of the series and genre in a way that feels new and surprising, updating the series with a hilarious metacommentary on fandom, geekery, cosplaying and an abashedly romantic gay love story that's both exhilarating and heartbreaking in the way the best love stories should be.
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